Militia releases “Strength and Honor”

You readers may remember a February TMT article entitled “Thrash to Destroy With Militia.”  In that, TMT interviewed Militia’s bass player Robert Willingham and we discussed some of the work going into their new CD Strength and Honor.  To the delight of fans, both new and old, the CD was released in March 2012.

Militia’s MySpace page states their style is a “a unique combination of thrash, power and melodic/technical elements.” For the new CD, I believe they achieved a combination of good old thrash metal and power metal with a bit of progressive thrown in the mix.  It came out a very good blend.

Strength and Honor has great cover art

First, the artwork on the cover is awesome.  It is some of the best the metal world has seen in a long time.  It reminds me of some of the cool heavy metal album covers from back in the 1980’s.

The track listing, which contains some very cool titles for songs, has a total of 10 songs and one instrumental that is the intro to the CD.

1. A Call To Arms

2. Furious

3. The Judas Dream

4. Before The Fall

5. Doomed

6. And The Gods Made War

7. Onslaught

8. Injustice

9. The Black Marauders

10. Unveil The Faith

11. We Need A New Enemy

Strength and Honor has some excellent twin guitar attacks from Jesse Villegas and Tony Smith.  Some nimble fingered bass playing from Robert Willingham really sets the foundation.  Vocalist Mike Soliz belts out some great falsettos that remind me a lot of King Diamond.  Now the odd part..., drummer Phil Achee, due to living in another state, was unable to record the drum parts for the CD.  Mike Soliz, who also plays drums, stepped in and played for the recordings.  This may be the reason for the very hollow sounding snare on all the tracks.

After listening to Strength and Honor several times, some of the standouts, in my opinion, are the opening instrumental “A Call to Arms”, it really sets the mood for the entire CD.  Other standouts are “The Judas Dream”, “Onslaught” and my favorite “Unveil the Faith”.   I'm not going to break down each song and tell you about the guitar riff, the melody, etc.  For this, you need to spend a few bucks and buy the CD and listen to them.

In short, I fully recommend to the readers of Thrash Metal Times, and the rest of the metal community, to purchase the CD.  On the TMT rating scale, Strength and Honor gets 4 out of 5 thrashes!  


You can order the CD directly from the band via their MySpace and Facebook pages. For those of you that prefer the digital download version, Strength and Honor is available on CD Baby and iTunes.

JS